Monday, May 1, 2017

This fascinating talk poses the question: is the way science approaches
life’s biggest mysteries restricting our ability to solve them?Life
on this planet is the history of rule breakers – species that didn't
get the memo about how they were supposed to behave.

So if we are
studying rule breakers, then shouldn't how we study them break the
rules, too? Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado is a researcher at the
Stowers Institute for Medical Research and the Howard Hughes Medical
Institute and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Dr.
Sánchez Alvarado's current research efforts are aimed at understanding
the molecular and cellular basis of animal regeneration.

Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado is an advocate for underwater creatures with
behaviors almost too weird to believe.

The sea is full of strange, little-understood creatures, says researcher
Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado at TEDxKC

(Collage: Alejandro Sánchez
Alvarado)

From a plankton/jellyfish that
reproduces asexually and births its slinky-like progeny from its “head”
(see below) to a worm that can be sliced into 18 pieces and keep living,
the researcher believes investigating these little-understood lifeforms
— and finding new ones — may hold the secret to new breakthroughs in
science.

A tunicate called Thalia democratica asexually births its offspring from its “head”

(Video: Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado)

We have only combed through a tiny section of the world’s oceans,
Alvarado says, while “ninety-five percent of our oceans remains
unexplored.”
This 95% could be the key to cures for currently incurable
diseases, better understanding of our genetic history, expansions to our
tree of life, if only people believed in the value of this exploration,
Alvarado says.
“We are measuring an astonishingly narrow sliver of life
and hoping that those numbers will save all our lives [by propelling
research],” he says.
“What is even more tragic is that [many underwater creatures']
biology remains sorely understudied,” Alvarado says. For example — the Schmidtea mediterranea, a type of flatworm that is common in coastal areas around the Mediterranean can regenerate itself after being chopped up into parts, yet it isn’t a household name or hot button topic in science.
“You can grab one of these animals and cut them into 18 different
fragments and each and every one of those fragments will go on to
regenerate a complete animal in under two weeks,” he says.
“18 heads, 18
bodies, 18 mysteries.”

The regeneration process of a Schmidtea mediterranea

(Photos: Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado / Jochen Rink)

“For the past decade and a half or so I’ve been trying to figure out how
these little dudes do what they do and how they pull this magic trick
off, but like all good magicians they’re not really releasing their
secrets,” Alvarado says.